Food pantries in Nashville schools tackle students' hunger

Program sends kids home with food for families

Sep. 9, 2013

Eric Esters, right, the community outreach liaison for the health department, and school social worker Sheila Upshaw load up backpacks at John Early Middle School's food pantry. John Early was the first public school to have its own on-site pantry. / John Partipilo / The Tennessean

Written by

Lisa Fingeroot

The Tennessean

Eric Esters, left, who is the community outreach liaison for the health department, and school social worker Sheila Upshaw load up backpacks at John Early Middle School's food pantry. / John Partipilo / The Tennessean

Hunger by the numbers

• 1 in 4 Metro Nashville schoolchildren is hungry or at risk of hunger

Katherine Kendall will never forget the eye-opening lunch period when she realized some of her students had no food at home.

Kendall, coordinator of school and community-based support at Nashville’s John Early Middle School, saw one child put a hamburger in his pocket and another take food out of the garbage can to save for later.

“It was like a ginormous spear into my heart,” she said.

Her plea for help sparked the creation of a food pantry program for schools so successful that officials are hoping to add eight to 12 more pantries in Metro schools during the next two years.

Taking action

The first day of the 2013-14 school year marked the one-year anniversary of Kendall stuffing leftover hamburgers into two bags to send home with the hungry kids she saw, and also her first call to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee.

By the time Kendall called, Middle Tennessee Second Harvest President and CEO Jaynee Day had begun hearing praise about the organization’s weekend backpack program. That program is used in several states to send home food on weekends with kids eligible for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program.

“Teachers started describing the impact that program was having,” Day said. “Kids would come in on Mondays and be more alert and require less discipline. Then they started saying, ‘We have families who are hungry.’ ”

Many teachers were trying to help by creating their own small food pantries and giving out food to students who would tell them, ‘My family doesn’t have any food on the table at all,’ ” Day said. “They came back to us and said, ‘If you guys can give us any help, these are the issues.’ ”

Rapid expansion

The project that began at John Early quickly expanded to other schools, selected by the percentage of students in the federal lunch program. Those schools are Glencliff, Maplewood and Pearl-Cohn high schools and Napier Elementary.

About 75 percent of Metro Nashville’s 82,000 public school students qualify for the federal lunch program.

“We just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Kendall said of John Early being the pilot school for the program. She estimates the program helps about 15 families a month there by supplying emergency food supplies and connecting them with other social agencies that can help.

Some other Metro schools have teacher-sponsored pantries that are not yet associated with Second Harvest.

“How can you be successful if your stomach is growling?” Day said. “It’s affecting their ability to learn and be successful. We see this every day.”

According to Second Harvest, Metro Nashville statistics match those of the nation, which say one in every four children is food-insecure — a term used by Second Harvest to indicate the child is not getting three meals a day or is at risk of hunger because the family has no money and does not know how they will get another meal.

“We firmly believe if children are food-secure, have an adequate diet, are not having to worry about that, then they can be much more successful in school,” Day said.

Working poor

Most people are surprised when they find out who Second Harvest is serving, Day said. About 60 percent are Nashville’s working poor, who earn minimum wage or slightly more.

Many once made $20 an hour but lost their jobs because of layoffs and may have run through their savings before finding a job that paid much less, Day said. “They are your neighbors … they sit next to you at church.”

They still have rent and health-care expenses, she said. “Families are having to make difficult choices. ‘Do I buy food or medicine or pay the power bill?’ We hear parents say, ‘I skipped the evening meal so my kids could eat.’ ”

Others resort to alternatives like grabbing packages of ketchup from fast-food restaurants and mixing it with hot water for soup that night, she said. “That is the reality of it.”